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Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: A01-03. To panel A01.

Title of paper:

Author:

Nilza Cesar (Universidade Eduardo Mondlane).

Short abstract paper:
The case study assess the development of the EMU, employing a mixed methods design. A range of interventions mainly promoted by foreign entities have created a positive impact and transformed the university in the last 40 decades.

Long abstract paper:
The emergency of the Mozambican Higher Education system dates back to the colonial era with the emergency of the General Studies of Mozambique that later become University of Lourenço Marques. Nonetheless, due to political circumstances, the university gained a new designation - Eduardo Mondlane University - and external forces drove its early development. The external support was even reinforced with the global awareness on the importance of the tertiary education for the country's development endeavour. This evaluation study focus, on one hand, on the processes of change and development of the University Eduardo Mondlane. On the other it looked at the effectiveness of a holistic, long-term and participatory approach for institutional development assessment, shortly called PADev. A sample of 100 individuals was purposely selected from a heterogeneous study population comprised of two main groups, the university community and the external stakeholders. A combination of data collection methods was employed which consisted of review of secondary data, key informant interviews, crowd writing and focus group discussion. The study results showed that external interventions have contributed to the occurrence of remarkable changes at Eduardo Mondlane University seen as an institution of higher learning, research and emancipation in many ways. Specifically the various interventions enabled institution's capacity building; curriculum development; development of innovative teaching and learning methodologies; strengthen research capacity, infrastructure and research environment; fostered post-graduate training; and funding. Despite its great dependency of the external support in the last 40 years and its internationalization attempts, the study indicated that the University remained autonomous in its management decisions. Moreover, the PADev experiment of the UEM revealed to be ineffective as the only method for assessing the development of the UEM. Notwithstanding, PADev enabled social interaction among study participants promoting collective learning while sharing factual and experiential knowledge about the institution's context of change, the factors and actors that have contributed for the transformation and development of the Eduardo Mondlane University.

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